On brevity being the soul of wit, and all that rot.

Flying home from BlogHer13 in Chicago

If you know me, you know I tend to be "long form."

What I usually call a post, most sane bloggers without perfectionism / obsessiveness and time management issues would call three posts.

But it has also been true that the same forces that lead me to such excessive verbosity are, at the moment, shutting me down. I have barely posted in the last six months. And while I am not happy about that, I also know I don't have the wherewithal to devote the same energy to my blog at this moment as I have in the past.

And, truth be told, I'm still struggling with the emotional aftermath of my Mother's death. Ironic that this blog began as my father was dying, of my need to speak from all the jumbled pain therein. That opened the floodgates that fed my writing.

And now the fallout from my mother's death has dammed up my words again. But not completely. A trickle is still flowing through.

So I am considering this: trying to let myself write really short posts for this month.

At our LTYM BlogHer breakfast in Chicago last Sunday, I was sitting across from Lisa Rosenberg (of the blog Smacksy) and when it became clear that another woman at our table didn't know her work, Alexandra and I fell over ourselves gushing about how much we love Lisa's blog -- how adorable her son is, how lovely the writing. Alexandra mentioned how refreshing it was that the posts were so short, just a perfect little slice of life.

And it got the wheels turning... maybe I can do this... write short posts with just one thought, one story, while waiting for the longer ones to come.

I have so, so many bits of writing sitting in my "unpublished" queue that I have been thinking of as "half-written posts." What if I just call them posts (with a little polishing of course) - hit the "publish" button and move on?

Would the world stop spinning on its axis? Unlikely. (But don't blame me if it coincidentally does.)

There is so much that has gone on this spring and summer that I haven't talked about yet here... graduations... rites of passage... summer camp... visiting cousins... Bat Mitzvahs... new babies... Jake's evolving development... even a recipe I wanted to share.

Also there is one very important, very PARTICULAR half-finished post that I have pushed myself to complete, even if it is less complete than I think it should be.  I have actually put it up on my blog just before this post - backdated, of course, to July 29th, the only proper day for my boys 11th birthday post, since it was, of course, their 11th birthday.

So you can read that here: They go to 11!

See, you get two for the price of one today. (A bargain!)

And so now, of course, I have written an un-short post about how I am going to be writing short posts.

(But then again, isn't that so me?)

More to come soon, I (sort of) promise.